Well I've been a blogger for four years now, which is hard to believe! And the one thing I've learnt is that I sure as hell made a lot of mistakes before I became successful. My first two years were a huge learning curve. And I've still got a long way to go.

But what's great for you is that you don't have to make the same mistakes I did. You can learn from me and use that knowledge to put yourself out there and get a breakthrough with your online presence.

If this is your first year as a new blogger, here are some common mistakes that you can learn to avoid.

Social media - can you imagine life without it? Instagram, Facebook and Twitter have all changed so many different parts of our lives, including:

The way we communicate with friends and stay in touch with family

How we promote ourselves and sell products

How we decide what we’re going to buy

And so much more.

I don’t know about you, but it’s now such a big part of my life that I wouldn’t know what to do without it!

We might have thought that social media was just a way to chat with our friends and document our lives. But it’s safe to say it’s become much more than that. Having a social media presence is more important than ever for bloggers to get noticed and become recognised online.

When it comes to social media, though there are no set rules, it can definitely become overwhelming when you do it without a plan. That’s where a social media strategy is going to help you.

Over the past few months, I feel like I’ve done a lot of explaining about what I actually do as a writer and online business manager.

A lot of bloggers and business owners find it difficult to outsource, because they never usually know where to start. But there are certain tasks I do for clients that help them free up SO much time in their schedule (seriously, I know how long it can take to format a blog post or schedule social content!)

If you’re not sure exactly when would be the right time to start expanding your team and outsourcing some of your tasks, then this post is for you.

So, I bet the question you’re asking is when is the right time? And the answer is probably sooner than you think…

Both social media platforms and online marketing as a whole are great strategies to focus on individually. Combine them together and they make the perfect recipe for success.

But we all know that managing social media takes a lot of effort and hard work. Plus with all the noise out there, it's tough to make sure we're using it effectively.

Whether you're using it for your blog, small business or personal brand, it can be a challenge to maintain and build a presence across multiple platforms. Luckily, there's something you can use to make it a lot easier - a social media management tool.

Don't get me wrong - social media management tools don't do all the work for you. But they do save you a lot of time when it comes to managing your social platforms. From Buffer to Hootsuite and Smarterqueue to Edgar, here are 6 reasons why using a social media management tool will help you.

P.S. Be sure to grab a copy of your free social media posting schedule template, where you can get a customised, optimised schedule for each of the main social media platforms - this helped increase traffic to my website by over 100% in just two 2 months!

Let’s face it - Google Analytics can be very confusing.

Once you’re looking at the numbers, you can get lost in there for hours. Ain’t nobody got time for that…

The end of the year is a great time to look back over your progress over the previous twelve months. But where should you start? What are the most important metrics to track? This is the key information you need to look at (plus what it all means!)

#1 | TRAFFIC SOURCE

This is the one thing that every bloggers wants to know...how do people find your website?

How to track it: In Google Analytics, head to Acquisition then Overview. This dashboard tells you what percentage of people have visited your website and where they came from.